


The Window Box

by BelcherMorganJames



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Broken TARDIS, First Meetings, Gen, I'm Bad At Tagging, Major Original Character(s), Original Character(s), Post-Serial: s042 Fury from the Deep, Victoria is mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:29:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27913816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BelcherMorganJames/pseuds/BelcherMorganJames
Summary: An unusual little girl named Star with a wondrous relationship to time and space finally gets her life questions answered with the arrival of a battered blue police box in the junkyard where she lives.
Relationships: Second Doctor & Jamie McCrimmon
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	The Window Box

The door at the furthest end of the room swung up slowly with an almighty creak, something which Star, the small girl in the strapped dress, was unusually familiar with. She made only gentle steps over to her dresser, so gentle even that the splinter-ridden, rotting-wooden floor honestly felt like true level. ‘Where did I put it?’ she pondered to herself Star slowly paced her bare feet over to the far wall. On this far wall was a single nail, roughly hammered in, with a tattered tartan neckerchief hung in a noose over it. Star took this off of the wall and walked over to the quote-unquote bed beneath the chipped double-glazed window and muttered an indistinct verse to herself; something about time and sight.

Star threw herself onto the sturdy steel frame topped by a horribly stiff mattress. She slung the neckerchief over her head, but turned it round to the back of her neck and raised the fabric over her grey-bleached eyes. In amidst the pitch warping of clouds and cloudy entities, a gradually building rush of air, oscillating different pitches, followed by an also randomly-oscillating ringing ran around Star’s head, there was a faint voice coming from the distance. Star had only ever heard one female voice in all her life. Or at least as far as she could remember; and it wasn’t a particularly nice voice so she chose to believe that it was a matured version of her own voice. ‘I’m here’ she proclaimed in a delightfully sing-songy way, ‘I’m coming to find you, mummy’. Star took the blindfold off of her eyes and peered around her. The entire world around her bed head changed. It was all blue, wispy and out of focus. As she expected, she look down at her bed, which was the only constant in this weird place. She thrust herself off of the bed, and her entire body became grey and translucent. She cupped her hands and held them to her mouth to bolster her voice. ‘I’m here!’ she wailed into the empty void.

The adult version of her voice did not answer.

Trying to cry out again and again, the unnatural voice did not arise again, when before, anything more could be said, the wind and ringing sounds abruptly ceased to the sound of an inherently unpleasant woman’s voice. ‘Yes, I know your bloody here, you daft twerp’, she screamed up from the other room, ‘Now, get your useless hide down to this hall, before I lob it off, have it cast in copper and mounted on the front door!’ Star took in a deep, miserable breath, before rising from her bed, the night seemingly having passed by in an instant, before making her way down to where the spiteful old woman had called her from.

A large, metal, sliding door slammed open as Star walked into the echoey hall, resting herself on a creaky bench. For all the things Star really loved about this warehouse, the one thing she didn’t love was the miserable old woman to whom she seemed to find herself in lifelong servitude. Quivering her tongue for a short while, she lifted her eyes just enough to see the Proprietor labouring away not ten meters from where she was sat. ‘I take it you there was something you wished of me, madam’, she uttered meekly, ‘I’d only just got to sleep.’ The old bat’s gawping eyes swung around and pinned fast on her. ‘If I told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, and since I haven’t really got it in me to tell you another thousand times, get it into you’re deaf, little minxy pan. YOU. DON’T. PIGGIN’. SLEEP!’ Star felt the need to remind her that she was simply twelve years old. ‘Twelve-year-old girls’, she proclaimed indignantly, ‘should know the sodding difference between night and day. You sleep at night, you work during day. That’s how most people tend to go about having a respectful life. Like you’d know anything about that, you wierdo. Don’t you go thinking you’re exempt because your supposed to be this special little enigma we’re supposed to bend over backwards for.’

However she decided to word it, the large, bellowing woman always managed to get under her skin like a termite beneath tree bark. ‘I’ve neither expected not asked for that’, she uttered softly; the Proprietor found her patience wearing thinner and thinner with everything the child said. ‘Tell that to the stupid little star-shaped marks you got on these titchy, little shoulders of yours!’ the horrid woman shrieked, tearing off the sleeves of Star’s shirt. Star never got angry, even when being relentlessly bullied by the only person she’d ever been permitted to know, there was always this subtle sense of calm about her. But for some reason unbeknownst to her, she was really starting to hurt today. ‘I’ve already said…’; the Proprietor cut her off, ‘Oh, and I’m sick to the back teeth of all of your ‘time and space’ rubbish. Your shoulders aren’t any more special than the skin off my hard-workin’ elbows and don’t forget it.’ She bellowed as she slammed a heavy metal object down of her own workbench, ‘Now get on with your tasks you useless oik!’ Sulkily, the cruel old woman stormed off with a large sack of metal urns slung across her shoulder.

* * *

Star marched, with a clear head, through an ever expanding collection of oddities. She didn’t have many fixed constants in her life, but she loved this aspect. She carried around a dusty, black notebook under her left arm, whilst carrying some some old tape reels in the left hand. She was always impressed with herself for her ability to spread her fingers so far apart so she could grab things more easily. It was something she was simply born with, she assumed. As she paced through the rows of clutter in the courtyard, she found herself standing by a large rusted plaque, quite a bulky looking thing. She crouched down beside it, but she couldn’t make out what it said; the words had worn away with years of corrosion having obscured the metal. Taking a quick peak behind her to make sure nobody could see, she took the book out from under her arm, placed it on the floor, and opened it to a blank page with a pen in her right hand.

As soon as all was silent, she rested her left thumb on the first semblance of a letter on the rusted plaque, and concentrated really, really hard. She opened her eyes and her thumbnail had become completely blurry, and when she raised it to her left eye, she could see right through her thumb and gazed upon the same plaque, but it appeared good as new. As she read the plaque, she scribbled down the inscription as she read. “Deceased with honours: Lt. H.R. Goddard - He went with songs to the battle, he was young; straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. He was staunch to the end against odds uncounted, and fell with their faces to the foe. He shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary him, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember him.” Star had never been to a graveyard of any kind; in fact, the very possibility of the Proprietor having invested in this at all was extraordinarily remote. She didn’t believe in patriotism, nor did she care for the lost lives lest they had overly deep pockets stocked with profits.

Perhaps she had purchased it in a job lot or something of the kind; whatever the reason, it was here now. Star took another fleeting glance around her; it was always necessary when she did what she was about to do. With nobody around there watching, she placed the same thumb on the indentations where the lettering used to be and ran it around the first ‘D’, and then ‘E; and then ‘C’ and as she did those three letters before pressing onto the rest, the metalwork changed, as if by magic, and the text was visible on the plaque again, good as new. Taking another quick shoot of the eyes to make sure there still weren’t people watching, she brushed the rest of the plaque with her fingertips and all the rust and corrosion just flaked away into a beautifully polished metal, like when someone brushes away dust from a shelf. Star had absolutely no idea as to how she was capable of this feat, but had the distinct feeling today that there was an answer after all. She knew the answer wasn’t going to come on a white horse and armour; that’s the type of thing she’d expect from children’s fantasy. But someone knew, someone had to. Star stuffed the plaque in a sack and left it in a surprisingly large junk shed, where she kept all of the items that the Proprietor would just have thrown away. These were her oddities.

It wasn’t too much later that the ghastly old goat’s voice hit the back of Star’s head from afar. ‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ she griped, ‘I’ve actually got something useful for you to do!’ Closing the door of her junk shed, the Proprietor wouldn’t let her lock it, after all it was her warehouse, Star ran over to the other side of the courtyard, avoiding all of the brikabrack that the Proprietor had little time and patience to move herself. ‘I’ve got a particularly special object in today’, the horrid woman uttered, gesturing to the new arrival. ‘And because I’m such a curtious individual’ a comment which was almost met with a serious eye roll of Star’s part but self restraint prevented it, ‘I’m giving you the opportunity to look it over’. Star was too despondent with hearing this to care much but feigned excitement anyway. ‘Mind you’, the Proprietor proceeding, ‘if I get the slightest impression that you’re having a funny turn or squirrelling parts which may be of value, I’ll ensure you never see the light of day again!’ With a dominating shine of the teeth, she plodded back inside, trouncing on the soles of her boots. Turning to the new arrival, although she had initially been dubious, Star’s impression of the object was quickly staring to alter. Grabbing the divide of the tarpaulin covering it, she lifted it away and the green, plastic sheet fell to the ground. Beneath the sheet was a small, blue box with quite a remarkable number of bruises across it’s four walls. Even though it was an object, Star felt as if bruises was the correct turn of phrase.

Picking up a slew of measuring equipment from all over the immediate area, holding her notebook under her chin, Star started examining the police box. Her affinity with this artifact slightly frightened her; how and why would she get so emotional over a police box? She was so lost in thought, that she snagged her shoelace on stray piece of metal sticking from the ground and while all the equipment fell to the ground, Star managed to hold herself up on the corner of the box. Pulling herself up, she failed to notice the box vibrating very, very subtly, realising only after she had started crying. She felt unable to be near the box for the moment, so she scribbled down a few measurements, which, in her unusual hysteria, looked like utter gibberish and hurried back inside the warehouse.

* * *

The Proprietor had been none pleased that Star had bunked on the job she had been given and so shut her in her junk shed until evening. However, this was Star’s shed after all. The white-haired little girl knew all of it’s ins and outs, including a clear 20 inch span between the back wall and the line of bushes which surrounded the entire grounds, more than enough of a girth of the small, wirey frame of, say, a twelve-year-old girl. Moving over to that very wall, she set aside a great big mesh frame, which was only really there to keep out any night scavengers should the wall be compromised in any way. But this is what Star wanted; laying on her back with her legs primed, she forced as heavy as kick as her body could manage and at the very moment of impact, her feet shot through two holes of completely degraded steel. The rusting expanded around 10 centimetres around the points of impact, like when a paint ball hits a wall. Peeling away the excess metal, which was as malleable as a damp cotton ball at that point, Star squeezed herself through the gap, pulling the mesh frame tight over the hole from the other side. Throwing a tattered black sheet over herself so as not to be seen, Star tip-toed around all the piles of debris and scrap which the Proprietor collected. Her heart was racing; at any moment, the Proprietor could look out the window and see this moving black sheet and her life wouldn’t be worth living.

Luckily, she didn’t.

Before long, Star had located the police box again. ‘I don’t know if you understand me’, she squeaked in a low-key tone to the box, ‘I surely can’t think you would respond. But I get this strange empathy off of you; you’re not just a box. And I think we can be honest with each other.’ The box remained silent; it could have been making a very quiet noise, but the rats fighting over something probably benign and insignificant in the distance was causing a real racket. Star opted to try and do something which she felt incredibly daft even entertaining the thought of. Lowering herself down to her knees, which felt incredibly uncomfortable on the broken ground beneath them, she placed her forehead on the left hand door. Resting her fingers against the lobes of her ears and pressing hard, the noise dissipated and she spoke again. I couldn’t quite tell you if it was words she was speaking or something entirely non-distinct, but a small glimmer of light came back into the lamp on top. ‘Thank you’, she whispered to the box, before planting a gentle kiss on the small, protruding Yale lock. Pulling her head away, composing a stance of sudden self-ridicule, the left door swung inwards. Almost instinctively, Star fell backward onto a pile of old carpet, thankful that she hadn’t toppled onto the mass of moped pieces stacked up right next to it. Readjusting herself, she rose to her feet and placed a flat palm upon the inward-facing door, pushing it further apart from the other one. She swung her head around to be sure that she hadn’t been spotted yet, before she scrambled into the box and gently pushed the door closed.

On the other side of the doors, another jolt of power skirted through her every vein, coursing around every fibre and cell in her small body. Turning away from the door, Star was confronted by a rather baffling sight. The interior of the box didn’t match the exterior in any way; the indentations of the windows and the groves in it’s four walls weren’t there at all. The box was still small and dark, aside from the small light which shone above her. In place of the other three sides were large, glass panels, or at least what she interpreted to be large glass panels. Behind the glass panels were wide images of a large room which expanded around her on all three sides; it was bright and incredibly vivid. Star didn’t think that these were images like on a television; televisual images tended to be grainy and static, but this place was as clear as crystal. It was more like this really was a room, frozen and sealed off by three glass windows, the look-in to a curiously different world. Looking around a little bit more, she finally caught two men standing beside a really peculiar oddity, a hexagonally-panelled body on top of an indented hexagonal tower and a glass cylinder sticking out of the top. The two males stood alongside and both of them completely frozen in the position in which they stood, neither of them having noticed Star’s presence. One of the two was a stumpy little man with a perturbed expression on his face. He appeared to be at least forty to forty-five years old, at the very least and wore a incredibly baggy coat for someone of his stature as well as a twee bow tie and check trousers. The other man couldn’t have been any more that five or six years her elder, quite a well-built, young lad with quite an amusing skirt on.

Star glared hard at the two obtrusive figures and couldn’t see past the fact that they were completely frozen in place. A dash of sweat off the older man’s brow even remained stoically motionless on his forehead. She lifted a small, quivering hand to the plated glass when a sudden foreboding impulse forced it’s way up her throat and threw her hand aside. She quickly turned to the door and forcefully clutched the catch, pulling on it so hard that it came clean off. Holding the catch in her hand, Star watched, wonderstruck, as the ovular piece of metal seemed to melt into the palm of her hand, when the liquid suddenly rose up and reformed into a key, chain and all. Looking back at the door catch, Star witnessed the inexplicable yet again as a brand new catch started to materialise in exactly the same position as before. Twiddling it to be sure it was real, she twisted it and sped out as quietly as she could, closing the door behind her. She flew back into the darkness of her junk shed, clutching the key to her chest; without too much thinking she quickly slung the chain around her and and dropped the key down the front of her dress, out of sight.

Come the morning, Star had done her best to disguise the hole in the back of the shed; she’d done good enough a job that the Proprietor didn’t give it any credence. Sat in the middle of the warehouse filing away at the remains of an old stage light, she twitched her eye over to Star walking very care-free in spite of her attitude yesterday. ‘Don’t go getting over yourself, girl’, she called over, ‘I own you and every single item of clothing on you back. Don’t dare try and hide things from me.’ Star dragged up the same measuring equipment she had previously, holding it in a nice fabric bag. ‘I’m going to continue my work from yesterday, seeing as I did it wrong before. If it’s all the same to you.’ She didn’t leave her any time to respond before she’d left the room in an echo of gentle footsteps. Strolling confidently out into the courtyard where the box had been last night, Star slung the bag down onto the cleanest bit of ground she could see on the cobblestoned, dust-ridden, scummy concrete. She pulled the key out from her top where she’d hidden it and scrambled to push it into the lock; she jerked it inside, turned it and pushed her way back into the box. She couldn’t stay long; by this point, she’d caught the Proprietor’s ire and she’d now be watched under a microscope.

She took in the room again, let it’s strange luminance wash into her. She was suddenly shook from her sense of bliss when a small detail caught her attention. Squinting hard through the glass, once again without touching it, she observed the old man’s hand had ever-so-slightly clenched. It was just by a fraction of what it was, but Star was certain; she was entirely convinced that he’d moved since she’d last seen it. The sense of retreat overtook her again and she stepped out of the box with remarkable speed. Choosing to dismiss such an incredible notion as such, Star pulled her bag off the ground and proceeds the measuring the box, still not entirely sure why the Proprietor had her do this. She was still uneasy after evening had fallen, so much so that it felt like centuries since she last felt sedate. She grasped her neckerchief and thrust it over her eyes, just as she had done before. She didn’t utter her little incantation, but instead let the astral entities seep into her mind. The wispy, blue void felt thicker and difficult to tame or envision. All around Star’s astral bridgehead was still and horrendously cold, the woman’s voice didn’t seem to come, but Star did not wish for her, which was just as well as there was another thing preying on her mind for her to try and comprehend. A strange, dull noise started to permeate the noise, echoey and blunted, like if someone were holding a pillow over it, but it was there. Star pressed her fingers into the ears so hard, she thought they’d burst, but the sound started to become clearer; not louder, but clearer, gentler. She ruminated over this noise, such an other-worldly tickle in her nerves, her ears, her fingers, her toes.

The void above started to tear apart and Star was back on her real bed in her real room, the material of the neckerchief having worn away and broken in a serration of broken strands of fabric. Star scratched all the grime off of the window beside her bed with an old penny and studied the blue thing outside. “I think we should get to no each other better” she muttered under her breath, “And we will.” Star returned to the box the next day, and the next day, and the day after that. Like frames in a film, the two men had moved every single time, just a fraction each and every day. After about four weeks, the little gentleman in the baggy coat had finally removed a handkerchief from one of his oversized pockets and wiped his brow clear of sweat. His young friend hadn’t done anything more remarkable than that; in fact, in that time, all he’d really done is straighten up his stance and put an expression of perplexion on his face.

* * *

Days over a course of time turned into weeks, which simply rolled by and still, day after day, Star returned to the box at whatever time was most convenient and looked in on her little enigmas. Over time, at appeared as if the little man was attempting some kind of engineering to the strange hexagonal plinth. Fiddling with switches, pressing buttons and turning dials. His friend’s expression remained more or less the same in all that time. Occasionally as the months went past, the Proprietor would leave for extended periods for what she called ‘Mutually beneficial enterprises’, and Star would take her book to the box and she sat with her back against the door, scribbling and sketching as fine as details as she could. The first was of the little man, then his companion and the room. She would give it another layer when the little man had moved enough. There wasn’t any reason for her doing this; she just called it something to pass life. She eventually stopped after two years when she’d run out of room in her book and had to get another one. And still the years went on and her age rushed by her, thirteen to fourteen to fifteen to sixteen, she grew and developed and matured and learned and between the spans of her seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays, she’d learned to be less enthralled by the Proprietor. And every single day, she visited the box.

It had been exactly six years since the box had arrived in the Repository. The key that Star had been granted by it was still as polished and shiny as the day she’d received it. She simply presumed that she tended to fumble with it in her sleep or rub it between her fingers in her pockets. She spent one afternoon arranging her oddities; over the years, lots had come, lots had gone, but she felt responsible for maintaining it nonetheless. Quite often she’d had to restore the wire mesh which covered up the rusted hole in the steel wall that she’d kicked in her adolescence. It never ceased to amaze her how the Proprietor, being as nosy and indignant as she is, hadn’t found it at any time. Star rested herself against a workbench and stared an empty stare at the arranged shelves of junk. She’d kept most of it polished and dusted and had arranged it in a system dictated by size, shape and age. Shaking herself from her blank mind, she left her shed and strolled around the courtyard, which had more or less become a cityscape of useless scrap at this point, so much so that it was like navigating a maze.

Getting clear of the isles of metal and rust which had presumably been deliberately constructed around Star’s shed, she dug her undersized trainers into the ground and trekked over to the police box. It wasn’t winter any more and the sky was clear, so she felt quite safe wearing the strapless blue dress that happened to be the only clean and decent piece of clothing she owned. It used to have strapped, but Star had quite cleanly removed them as she felt it necessary to keep her marks open to the elements. She stood with the box 20 paces in front of her and glared at it. “I’m 18 now”, she muttered determined, “It’s time to do this right.” Quickly unlacing her trainers, she slipped them off her bare feet and tossed them aside in different directions. She’d been planning this for a long time; there was a long sheet of material, almost like a red carpet leading up to the box, so that when she’d put her bare feet down on the broken stone ground, it would neither hurt nor worry. With that, she stormed up to the doors, pulled the key from the front of her dress and stepped inside the box. That impulse that had chained her from touching the glass panels of the box was strong and sharp, like a snake slithering through the veins in her arms, waiting to sink it’s teeth into her nerves. Gritting her teeth and widening her eyes so far that she felt they would burst, she raised the palms of her hands above her head, making her intentions clear with but a single word; “Hello”.

With that and to the exclusion of all other considerations, Star thrust her might onto the glass panel and jerked back with a sharp breath. She watched baitedly as the two men began to revert to the positions in which the stood the very first days she saw them before they were suddenly moving just like normal, speaking and breathing, walking and turning, running and jumping. She could finally hear their voices, the small gentleman spoke with quite a dignified English accent and was explaining quite a complicated process to the younger man, who reiterated his confusion with a type of voice that Star had never heard before. The younger man finally looked in Star’s direction and in his shock, tugged the older man’s arm, gesturing for him to look to. “Hang on a minute”, declared the young man, “Who’s she? I know what I saw, she was but a wee ragamuffin not a moment ago.” The older gentleman gestured for his companion to be quiet, and he strolled forward a few paces, grinning with his hands by his sides. “Now, I do apologise for the forward manner of my young friend, my dear” he said with a gentle, compassionate tone, “Allow me to start over. What is your name?”

Star’s eyes flickered in stoic disbelief, “Star”, she finally sputtered. “What a delightful name.” said the older man, “My young friend here is Jamie and I am called the Doctor.” Star contorted the words in her throat for a short while, before finally straightening herself out. “The Doctor?” she pondered, “I’ll say it isn’t the most unusual name I’ve ever heard”. The Doctor beamed in agreement, “I imagine you must be quite confused as to where you are”. “Well, I’d like to know how she went from being a little girl to this lassie in a matter of moments” Jamie butted in. “In time, Jamie. In time”, the Doctor retorted before returning to Star. “What is this place?” “This is my ship; it’s called the TARDIS. And with it, Jamie and I are capable of transversing the eternity of time and space”. Star shuffled on the spot; she hadn’t the faintest idea what was meant by what he just said but she’d had this sort of gut feeling that it was the response she’d get prior to having asked the question. To this end, she said nothing, just glared innocently at the Doctor’s wise face. “Yes, quite.”

“Alright, do you think I could get a straight answer now?” Jamie insisted, hands locked gripping his hips, “You were talking about some kind of time shield thingy before she showed up.” “Ah, yes, Jamie. Well, the TARDIS’ defences and the appearance of this young lady are actually connected. You see, the ship had to put up a spacio-temporal seal between the inside and outside when it detected danger. But doing this split the interior and exterior of the TARDIS into alternately running timestreams. Inside, for us, it’s only been a matter of minutes, but outside, it would have been considerable longer than that, I would imagine” “Six years”, Star chimed in from her side of the glass wall. “Indeed; when Star interacted with the severance point between our timestream and her own, the two points in history were finally able to reassert themselves.” Jamie quivered the left corner of his mouth to insinuate that this wasn’t a straight answer but also accepted that this was as good as he’d get. This wouldn’t have been the type of thing he would have learned about in the Highlands. “Pretending what you just said made any sense, does this mean the problem’s over now?”

“I’m afraid not, Jamie,” the Doctor uttered, “Star only brought the two timestreams together for as long as she’s interacting with the severance point, which I imagine is what she’s touching. To actually break the seal, we’d need a specific piece of equipment which I, uh, appear to have misplaced.” Star took in those specific words and threw them around her mind for a moment, before finally asking the most important question she’d ever asked, “What does this bit of equipment look like?” The Doctor gathered his thoughts before looking over at Star with his finger on his chin. “Oh, it’s a rather small item. A cylindrical bar containing a perfectly-spherical purple stone, only so big. The container itself isn’t so much what I need but the stone inside it; if I had that, I could restore the TARDIS to it’s original state.” Star looked into her mind’s eye again, the wispy blue void sifting through the dead space between one thought and the next. “I know where that is!” She declared proudly. Jamie raised his eyebrows at this, “Oh, do you indeed? And you just happen to have it lying around somewhere?” The Doctor shook his head indignantly, “Skepticism is no excuse for rudeness, Jamie”; Jamie relented.

Star clutched her book and pulled it from her bag; trying to turn the pages with one hand wasn’t the easiest of tasks so she rested it on the ground and flipped instead until she found the drawing she’s done of the item in question. Holding it against the glass, the Doctor examined it and stroked his chin, deep in thought. “I suppose it is possible that the stone and it’s container could have been misplaced when the defences we’re activated, however remote the chances are. Nevertheless, could you get the stone for us?” Star winced and shifted her eyes around every opposing edge of the Doctor’s face before settling into his hopeful expression. “Not without difficulty”, she regretfully uttered, “If the Proprietor catches me..” The Doctor cut her off, “Don’t worry about the Proprietor, I’ve had an idea on how to settle her score” Star almost had a direct split of both pure euphoria and sheer terror at that, but the balance between the two was so perfect that she just nodded. “I suppose I’m procuring that stone for you then.” The Doctor beamed, hopping back to the control console and flicking a few switches, “I’ve set up a reset for the defence systems. All you have to do, Star, is bring the stone into the TARDIS and the interior and exterior with reconnect to a parallel temporal plane.” Star just took this down like a mouthful of water, “I won’t be long”. She removed her hand from the glass panel and both the Doctor and Jamie ceased to move.

* * *

With stale breath, she grabbed her book and stepped outside. To her amazement, night had fallen outside of the box and, even more unusual, the entire courtyard had been cleared, including her junk shed. Star felt clear, hot tears prick the corners of her mouth, before they ran back up her face and back into her eyes. Taking a shallow inhalation of air which sounded more like a squeak than a breath, she toddled over to the now dust-smother entrance to the warehouse’s main building. The hall’s large radius was now completely devoid of anything; a plain, dull-grey expanse setting the distance between one opposing wall and the other. Star just ran her thumb around the brim of her two fingers and pressed on, her tiny, weak footsteps barely piercing the veil of silence that encumbered her. If she remembered correctly, the Doctor’s piece of equipment was one of the Proprietor’s most securely-withheld assets. She kept it locked in a safe, which was itself locked inside another safe. Of course, Star’s natural abilities would have enabled her to have got her hands of the artefact at any time, but her subliminal fear and resentment of the old woman’s wrath prevented it. Stumbling aimlessly through the dark, she pondered on how long she could have been inside that box for everything to have been so viciously smothered by entropy in what for her was factually a matter of minutes. That parallel timestream thing the Doctor was talking about perhaps; she didn’t know.

She didn’t have too long to ponder over the triviality when she spotted the safe in question. She wasn’t too impressed with the bulky thing, as it wasn’t so much bulky as it was dinky, about the size she had been at 12 years old. It wasn’t a key lock, rather one of those ridiculously over-complicated thumbprint mechanisms, lord alone only knowing why a woman with no visible thumbprints would needed it. Resting on her knees again, Star clasped the cube’s edges with a firm grip and the Proprietor’s face was plastered through her mind like a tacky, sun-bleached wallpaper, like a clown’s face bounced around in a hall of mirrors. Slamming on the thing with the heels of her palms, these mental distractions disapparated into the same blue mist which wafted around in the black void. Eyebrows pincing the bridge of her nose like a crab’s claw, Star struck her thumb against the scanning face of the safe door and all the blood in her body seemed to convene in his hand as a thick, mold-like rust consumed the mechanism as the forced her hand right through the reinforced titanium plating and rebar inside. She couldn’t be certain of it, but it felt as is the safe within the outer one seemed to just collapse as soon as she approached it, the hairs of the back of her arm fixed forward in it’s direction like the snake hairs of a gorgon.

Opening her eyes, the room was around her again and her hand was inside the inner safe, clutching that cylindrical rod; Star wasted no time in yanking the item from inside the safe, almost dragging the inner safe out with it and ran out of the room, back across the warehouse floor to the courtyard. She was running at such a pace that for once in her life she actually felt the stones pummelling her bare feet, though they’d be gone within minutes so this was irrelevant. Knowing just when to stop running so the momentum of her speed would carry her to the split of the doors, she leant down and put her lips to the lock again and both doors swung open as if to receive her with open arms. Star rested her hand on the panel again, enabling the Doctor and Jamie’s movement. “I’ve got it!” she cried aloud to the two men. “Already? You’ve only been gone 5 seconds.”

“No time to quibble over that now, Jamie. Star, you place the bar against the panel and press against it; it should be able to pass through the severance point, seeing as it exited through it in the first place.” She took no time in complying and the component went through like a letter through a mailbox. Jamie hastily swiped the bar from the ground and tossed it to the Doctor, who in turn hastily ejected the purple stone from it’s container and thrust it on the console, while he slowly levelled the stone into a tiny, perfectly-spherical pedestal-like slot in the console’s base. “Jamie, hold tight to the console”, he yelled over to the scot, “and Star, you stand outside, this isn’t going to be a smooth process”. Star could already tell; the severance point was breaking down, she could feel the glass panel she had her hands on getting hot and waxy. Pulling her hand away when the heat was too much to cope with, she could see that the Doctor and Jamie had not completely frozen and their motions were slowly increasing in speed. Heart pounding and heat blazing, Star flew backwards out of the box and the doors slammed shut before her very eyes. The box started to shake in a very funny way, flickering and warping while staying stone-dead in the same place. And the warping, fluttering noise it made, it ran through Star like a high-speed bullet, like the noise that had awoken her from her sleep all those years ago.

Radiant.

“Yes!” came a shrill yet raspy scream from behind her, the voice of the Proprietor. Without much of a second thought, Star leapt to the TARDIS’ defence, while the Proprietor charged at them both like she had horns coming out of her head, screaming “Yes, Yes!” over and over.

“NO! You mustn’t!” Star insisted. The Proprietor screeched to a stop a few inches before her, gleaming with eyes blood red with greying pupils. She took Star by the hair and barbarically lifted her at least twice her height off the ground. “Stay out of my way, you parasite!” she roared, slamming her against the ground. Not a second later, she charged into the TARDIS, laughing and crying victoriously, before the laughs and cries become just cries, and the cries became eye-shredding shrieks so shrill that you’d have thought only dogs could hear it. The TARDIS slammed shut again and everything abruptly ceased. Rising to her feet again, Star trudged to the door and pushed the inward, with the Proprietor’s dead-stone shape being all she could see. She gently brushed her back with her fully-healed fingertip and a crack broke out across her whole back. The cracks rippled out all over the woman’s body before she fell and shattered over the TARDIS floor like a hollow skin. The pieces of her made Star feel funny, the backs of every piece made it appear as if there was no piece there at all.

“Now, Jamie," the Doctor panted, "now, the crisis is over.”

Star was speechless, utter and incomprehensible gibberish flooded her brain. Jamie did all of the questionable babbling on her behalf though, when the Doctor explained further. “The Proprietor was a scrounger; the last remnant of a sub species of time-devouring parasites. Since they can’t live in our universe corporeally, she was created as a vessel in which to travel. But when she stormed into the TARDIS when the timestreams were reasserting, the body it had made to exist on a spacial-only plane of existence burned away, leaving the parasite exposed and burning itself away as well.”

“Well, I, for one, have had rather enough of time-eating beasties and your technological nonsense for one day, I’m going to bed for a while.” The Doctor scrunched his brow in impertinence. When he look around the control room, Star was nowhere to be seen. “Oh dear. I suppose it’s time to find a home for the girl.”

* * *

Some hours later, Jamie returned to the control room, which looked as good as new, feeling refreshed and well-rested. “Ah, Jamie. How was your rest?”, the Doctor greeted him warmly. “Alright, I’ve had better. What happened to the girl, eh, Star?”

The Doctor caressed his hands gently, “Oh, I made some enquiries to that UNIT lot. Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart has things well in hand I should say.” He turned to the control console and played frantically with the switches and dials that were strewn across it. Taking hold of a bold, red switch on the far end, he yanked on it and a bellowing thud was heard across the room as the central column started to ascend and descend harmoniously. With the roar of the engines quietening slightly, the Doctor placed his hand on Jamie’s shoulder, “I know this hasn’t been said, but Victoria’s absence is well-felt, Jamie. But we understand her choice, and we must move on. The two of us have things to do, you and I, important things, and…”

The Doctor’s flow was interrupted by the shrill ringing emanating from up the TARDIS corridor. Gingerly plotting toward the noise, the Doctor and Jamie rounded a corner, to see a single figure, a single woman, Star, standing stationary in the centre of the hallway. Turning to face them, they spotted an incredible thing; with every whoosh of the TARDIS, her eyes would pulsate and with every wheeze, her hair would do the same. Clutching her hands together, she had only one thing to say to her two new companions, “Help me”. Jamie was thoroughly bewildered, but the Doctor just smiled.


End file.
